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You were meant to have energy, joy and be pain free. You were meant to have chemistry happen properly in your cells. If you have lost your energy, lost your joy or have pain, the chemistry in your cells has gone awry.

You are alive because of chemistry. When the chemistry stops, you die. When it happens incorrectly, molecules get made incorrectly and the wrong shape, or the molecules are not made at all. The accumulation of incorrectly shaped molecules damage you cells, then your organs and then you. You develop fatigue, pain, depression and more.

That is how we all slip from a state of excellent health and full vitality to gradual development of disease. It is how all disease begins: with broken biochemistry.

The most common reason for the broken biochemistry is a diet that fails to provide the necessary building blocks for the chemistry, that is the vitamins, minerals, essential fats and antioxidants that our cells need to do the chemistry of life properly. All the chemistry that happens in our cells depends on the food we eat. We are not plants, capable of photosynthesis to make our energy. We must eat food, a combination of plant and animal material to provide the building blocks that we need. There is no escaping that we need food to run the chemistry of life in our cells.

I know this firsthand. As a professor of medicine, I believed for years that using the newest, latest drugs and surgical interventions were how I could best help my patients become well. I thought the billions spent on alternative medicine were wasted monies. All this changed when I developed a chronic disease for which there is no cure, secondary progressive MS. I saw the best physicians and took the latest, greatest drugs, but continued to decline for seven straight years. Within four years of my diagnosis, I was confined to a tilt-recline wheelchair.

When conventional medicine failed to halt my decline, I began reading the medical science myself, identifying the 31 critical nutrients brain cells need to thrive. I designed an eating plan to ensure I was flooding my brain cells with those key vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fats. I began meditating every day and started a program of electrical stimulation of my muscles. Within one year of this new diet and lifestyle, I was able to walk easily through the hospital without a cane. I could even do an 18-mile bike ride!

So if you want to achieve full vitality, then feed your cells the very best food that is the most packed with vitamins, minerals, essential fats and antioxidants per bite.

Get those key building blocks for your cells by eating greens, sulfur-rich vegetables like the cabbage, onion and mushroom family vegetables, deeply colored vegetables and berries, grass-fed meat and seaweed. Avoid the foods that starve your cells and set you up for broken biochemistry like sugar and white flours.

Doing so will give your cells the building blocks they need, and your cells will again do chemistry properly. In so doing your cells will slowly replace the incorrectly made molecules with correctly made ones. You will be rebuilt, molecule, by molecule. Your health, joy and vitality will return.

For all of us, we can grow stronger, smarter, faster, and even sexier, not by relying on drugs or surgeries, but by feeding our cells the building blocks that we need to do the chemistry of life.

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Dr. Terry Wahls is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa where she teaches internal medicine residents, sees patients in a traumatic brain injury clinic and conducts clinical trials. She is also a patient with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, which confined her to a tilt-recline wheelchair for four years. Dr. Wahls restored her health using new theories and now pedals her bike to work each day.

She is the author of The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine and teaches the public and medical community about the healing power of intensive nutrition.

For more information, please visit terrywahls.com

This Post Has 11 Comments

  1. I couldn’t agree more! Thank you for adding your credentials to the common sense of less pharmaceutical medicine and more “farm”aceutical living.

  2. If you look up the word “Inspiration” in Webster’s Dictionary, you’ll see Dr. Wahls’ picture.
    Most mere mortals would have given up facing the obstacles she did.
    But, she’s no mere mortal.
    Not only did she overcome but she is helping lots of others overcome, too

  3. Dr. Wahls provides what modern medicine has been missing. Donate to her foundation, even a dollar; you won’t be sorry! What a scientist and teacher!

  4. The smartest approach to health and nutrition I’ve read yet, and I’ve been reading for many years! Your ideas have taken what I’ve already been doing by reading great books such as “Wheat Belly” and “Grain Brain” and going one step further. Thank you so much for this information, it’s life changing!

  5. Thanks for the common sense nutritional information so contrary to the ‘food pyramid’. Knowing our food and the way it helps our bodies work as God designed them is important. Thanks again.

  6. I am so grateful for Dr. Wahls. Her willingness to share about her healing journey with MS has gifted me with the opportunity to heal myself and to better nurture my loved ones with food. Life is so much more beautiful when we support those we love, including ourselves, with nourishing, life-enriching foods. Thank you, Dr. Wahls!

  7. I also live with secondary progressive M.S. and I follow the Wahls Protocol, in a word it WORKS! Buy her new book, donate to the Wahls Foundation, you will help her continue the research that has given so many of us HOPE and allowed me to reclaim my life from a chronic disease! Thank you Dr. Wahls!

  8. Thank you so much for your work in this area. I have a teenage daughter with autoimmune issues and having your research and books to backup what I’ve been telling her about the importance of consuming real food has been invaluable.

  9. Terry is proof of the foundation to health is in the fuel we ingest. I have added high quality supplements to counteract the nutritional depletion of our foods and as a result enjoy still climbing the highest mountains on the planet at 82. Thanks for the very clear lesson, Terry!

  10. ok, so this is the worst article I have read in 10 years. the fact that Wikipedia is a better source then this load of trash you call an article. get your kids vacinated, eat right, and you will be fine. you can eat a lot of trash and still walk. there are no magic cures for life. except this caren.

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